Palin is the Poster Child of America

I am watching Sarah Palin as she introduces her beautiful family to the Republican National Convention and I was struck by how much she and her loved ones are so much like the rest of us. She is a woman from a small town who became the mayor of that city. Later she went on to become the governor of the state that town is in.

* Among her five children, she has a child with Down Syndrome and had to make a life changing decision and she seems rightly proud and happy with that choice.

* She has a daughter who, at the age of 17, became pregnant and made the choice to keep it (and to marry the child's father).

* She has a son in the Army who is about to be deployed to Iraq and a nephew who is already in the Navy is in the Persian Gulf.

* She has a husband who is a member of a union. That husband exercised bad judgement some two decades ago and got a DWI. He has clearly rehabilitated himself.

* She was a runner up for Miss Alaska and being a young forty something, you can still see that beauty.

Then there are things that make her decidedly unique.

* This tough minded "hockey mom" use to play strong on the ice and her attitude that made her feared on the rink is seen in the way she legislates.

* She is a life time member of the National Rifle Association and can handle a gun quite well. Enemies beware.

* She brought down a political machine in Alaska that had a governor (of her own party) enjoying a luxury private plane, personal chef, and a limo (with a driver). She prefers to drive herself, sold the airplane (rumor has it on eBay), and the family prepares their own meals. For this tough minded governor, financial responsibility in government begins at home.

* She is plain spoken and clear. She doesn't "hedge her bets" with rhetoric to amass as many votes as possible. With Palin, what you see is what you get.

It is this "known factor", seen in both McCain and Palin that you never see from Obama and Biden. The Democratic ticket changes their messages to accommodate the audience they are addressing and they provide a dangerous shell game of which we won't see the results until after November. The stakes are too great for such a choice. We need this poster child for our Republic on a Presidential ticket. I think millions of other Americans will come to a similar conclusion upon watching Palin speak.